1. Field of the Invention
This invention relates, generally, to stock analysis. More particularly, it relates to a method for producing a stock neighborhood and predicting the ranking of stocks.
2. Description of the Prior Art
The financial market has always been under close scrutiny by a host of players with varied interests. Yet, due to the profit sensitive nature of the context, the existing literature is by no means complete and/or succinct.
Prominent firms tend not to publish their work since that analyses is their bread and butter. Academicians mostly stop at theorizing since the continual financial feed and other experiments are difficult to obtain.
Attempts have been made in ranking and/or modeling the performance of stocks using neural nets, but this conventional approach tends to be ineffective and time-consuming.
Because of feelings of unpredictability in stocks, few people actually attempt the stock market as a serious money making option. The web interface between the investor and the market also has not evolved much and more importantly is not an inviting one. As a result, despite being a lucrative option, the market has not been able to attract as many investors as it should have been by this day given the advancement of computing power.
People want information, rather than data, yet many of the prominent financial websites (e.g., GOOGLE Finance, YAHOO Finance, FIDELITY, CNN Money, etc.) stop only at providing the end user with a vast amount of data in an uninviting interface. As depicted in FIG. 1, the NEW YORK TIMES published a report in August 2009 claiming that fewer people are using the finance pages of GOOGLE compared to its other services. It becomes very difficult for a budding investor to arrive at a verdict about a stock based only on that data unless he/she is a finance guru. Instead of guiding the user, the overwhelming number of market parameters and business documents often scare the user away from making a trade.
The interfaces provided by these finance firms are neither complete nor succinct. Most of these websites provide a snapshot of the behavior of a stock in their main page with some predictions (using a green ↑ symbol or a red ↓ symbol) about the stock price. There is no way to know how accurate their forecasts have been in the past. Regardless, the user cannot rank the stocks based on different parameters, such as P/E Ratio, percentage change in price, EPS forecast, etc.
None of these firms rank stocks that fall within a given price range. None of the firms have the feature to rank or recommend stocks given a certain price range.
While analyzing the stock market, academicians mostly stop at theorizing since the continual financial feed is expensive. Most researchers deal with per day samples. Given the growth of processing power and applications based on machine learning algorithms in last decade, the existing technology in this area is conspicuously poor.
U.S. Patent Application Publication No. 2010/0280976 discloses aggregating investment data and real-time trade data of investors and ranking the investors according to investment performance derived from the investment data. This patent application ranks an investor portfolio based on acquired profit. In contrast the current invention predicts stock rankings based on the percentage change in price of the stocks.
Accordingly, what is needed is an effective mechanism of producing a stock neighborhood and predicting stock rankings. However, in view of the art considered as a whole at the time the present invention was made, it was not obvious to those of ordinary skill how the art could be advanced.
While certain aspects of conventional technologies have been discussed to facilitate disclosure of the invention, Applicants in no way disclaim these technical aspects, and it is contemplated that the claimed invention may encompass one or more of the conventional technical aspects discussed herein.
The present invention may address one or more of the problems and deficiencies of the prior art discussed above. However, it is contemplated that the invention may prove useful in addressing other problems and deficiencies in a number of technical areas. Therefore, the claimed invention should not necessarily be construed as limited to addressing any of the particular problems or deficiencies discussed herein.
In this specification, where a document, act or item of knowledge is referred to or discussed, this reference or discussion is not an admission that the document, act or item of knowledge or any combination thereof was at the priority date, publicly available, known to the public, part of common general knowledge, or otherwise constitutes prior art under the applicable statutory provisions; or is known to be relevant to an attempt to solve any problem with which this specification is concerned.